Northwood vs High settings

[Pillipilli]

Hi,

I have a P4 3.0Ghz @ 3.3Ghz northwood, asus p4p800 se motherboard, 4 x 512mb Ram and an asus x850xt pe. I just can't play bf2 on high settings because it's stuttering like hell. If I turn my agp aperture from 64 to 128 or 256, there is less stuttering but still not playable. Someone told me that my asus p4p800se is the problem? Are there peoples on this forum who have a p4 northwood and a very good video card who also have these problems. Please help, I'm searching for a month now and still couldn't find my stuttering problem. And the problem is the cpu or motherboard because a friend of mine is playing bf2 with the same config but on a p4 3.2 prescott and a gigabyte motherbord and he has no problems.

sorry for my bad English

[NoSoup4You]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

Make sure all of your drivers are up to date, mainly your motherboard, sound, and video card drivers. Also the AGP aparture should be set to 256 (since your Vid card has 256mb).

If you don't have an Audigy2 or above, down the soiund settings as BF2 uses a very demanding sound engine as well as graphics engine.

[Pillipilli]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I use the onboard sound on my motherbord. I also played bf2 with the sound disabled in the bios and it still stuttered. I have the latest drivers installed for shipset 865PE, update to latest Bios version, and have tried all drivers for my x850xt pe from 4.11 to 5.11 ATI site, Ngo, driverheaver, guru3d and omega. Still stuttering. I assume that updating the sound is with my bios. But if I have stuttering with sound disabled then I think that sound isn't my problem.
Is a p4 3.3Ghz Northwood fast enough to run high settings with 2GB Ram and x850xt pe? Could it be that my cpu is causing a so called bottleneck?

[imported_Mutrino]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I use the onboard sound on my motherbord. I also played bf2 with the sound disabled in the bios and it still stuttered. I have the latest drivers installed for shipset 865PE, update to latest Bios version, and have tried all drivers for my x850xt pe from 4.11 to 5.11 ATI site, Ngo, driverheaver, guru3d and omega. Still stuttering. I assume that updating the sound is with my bios. But if I have stuttering with sound disabled then I think that sound isn't my problem.
Is a p4 3.3Ghz Northwood fast enough to run high settings with 2GB Ram and x850xt pe? Could it be that my cpu is causing a so called bottleneck?

I have a p4 3.0GHz@3.2GHz, 2GB RAM and a X800XL videocard and play at almost all settings at high, 3 at medium, 4xAA, resolution is highest it will let me set it in-game, forgot the numbers and it runs just fine. I would suggest getting a dedicated good soundcard, close as many of your other applications as possible, defrag your drive and do not let winblows manage your swapfile.
I have a diff mobo though, Abit IC7 MAX. Your CPU is not the bottleneck.

Edit: correction, I just tried, I can play online 64 players on *all* high

[rombaft]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I actualy think your hard disc is the problem, realy, your system should be able to play the game all high without problems, but your harddisc is probably to full , or fragmentated like hell so the loading from HD to RAM takes way to long (textures and crap) wich means it will constantly need to swap because not verything is there yet.

try to defrag the HD , and how big is it, do not put more then 75% of the capacity on the HD, more will realy start to slow down the system.

Is your ram OK ? look in taskmanager how much ram your system is consuming,this could also be the problem, to many back ground progs running, maybe without your knowledge (virus, spyware, ... )

[mrbucket]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I agree sounds like file transfer problem. In my other comp I have a 2.6 northwood that is a great O.C.er, low heat and great post's. But my 3.2 Prescott only goes to 3.5 before stuff starts crashing, on top of that it creates great heat. I'm shooting for w/c to jump up the v-core. Anyways, check your HD and keep it clean. I defrag everyday, if it is clean and in order it only takes a couple of minutes.

[Pillipilli]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I have defraged my hard disk, set some options that only my page file should be used when there is not enough Ram and tweaked my windows so that most services are killed. But the strange thing is that only my Ram gets filled with 1GB when running bf2 and the rest becomes page file. So I thought that there is a problem with my physical Ram but when running prime95 I monitored the Ram usage again and it went up to 1.5 GB. I think it's my motherboard because the writing and reading speeds to my Ram are much lower then my friend and he has a 3.2 prescott and gigabyte motherboard.
I tought that maby there were people with the same problem but I guess not
Again, sorry for my bad English

[<DV8>mrbucket]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

Well good luck, I hope you can figure it out!

[Pillipilli]

Re: Northwood vs High settings

I have ordered a new gigabyte motherboard for Tuesday. I hope that should be the troublemaker. But if not, then I can bring the motherboard back, so it's only for testing.
I will post the result here as soon as possible